Twenty-two months ago, Shane Bunting, the man known to the hip-hop world as Madchild, was on the edge of the abyss. He had spent four years abusing alcohol and painkillers like Oxycodone, better known as OxyContin — Oxy for short.

Madchild was very much the author of his own misfortune. He liked to have a pop or two to cut the nervous edge of performing publicly with his hip hop band, the Vancouver-based Swollen Members. Doing all the festivals and touring, in the glory years for the band from 2002 to 2006, out of about 1,000 shows — 200 shows a year — he’d drink for each show.

And over time “three beers a show, turned into 17.” He says he didn’t drink at home. “It was just a crutch. I thought that I needed it.”

That dependency was soon compounded when he began to chase the beer with some percocet tablets.

Around 2006, “I kind of stumbled on it. It seemed really innocent. There was no awareness then of this epidemic that’s happening with percocet and OxyContin. People said, ‘Try a painkiller with your beer — it’s awesome.’ ”

And he did. Soon he made another bad decision. He dropped the percocets and picked up Oxy.

He tried to kick it a couple of times but it didn’t work.

One pill led to another and another and by the peak of his addiction, Madchild says he was knocking back 20 Oxy tablets a day.

It is street wisdom that once Oxy gets hold of you, it doesn’t let go easily. “Probably one of the gnarliest, for sure,” Madchild says. He tried to quit the pills but he was not able to kick the habit by himself.

His Oxy addiction is kind of ironic, he says. He says he would never have tried heroin. The example of Vancouver’s downtown eastside was enough to scare him away from that drug.

But the painkillers, they seemed innocent.

The tipping point for Madchild was really reached when his body started to totally break down.

He quit cold turkey and ended up in emergency, his left arm numb, lips purple. He survived that scare and turned a corner. A few days later, Madchild was in a program and using another drug called suboxone to help him wean off Oxy.

Much as a recovering heroin addict uses methadone to cut the craving, this drug helped Madchild. It wasn’t an easy road, though, because he dropped the pills and picked up cocaine. Eventually, though, Madchild broke free and is today clean.

Rehab wasn’t easy. “You have a huge fear of quitting (the drug),” he said. But he made the decision with the help of his parents, his girlfriend, his bandmates, his manager and a caring doctor, and he got off the pills.

When he finally emerged out of the haze, like Rip Van Winkle, Madchild woke to a different life — one without all the benefits of success. He lost the glitter that comes with fame: the cars, the houses — in all about $3 million in goods and cash because of his addiction.

“I went to jail for five years and I came out and everyone was doing different dances.” He was rolling quarters for cigarettes, he says.

Once clean, Madchild had to stay clean and so he locked himself away and turned to music.

Over 10 months he wrote the music for his first solo CD called Dope Sick, a title that is emblematic of the crucible he has passed through. It was released in late August. He has also had some EP success this past year and will tour with another major hip-hop artist, TechN9ne, this fall. He says he wants to give the solo career a real crack. His bandmates, he says, are fully behind him.

He is also still working with bandmates Rob the Viking and Prevail. Swollen Members has been touring their latest CD, Dagger Mouth. That’s what is bringing them to the Kitchissippi Music Festival west of Ottawa on Aug. 18. Sales for Dagger Mouth have been in the 30,000-unit range worldwide, Madchild says, and that’s a real positive.

“The cool thing about it is that we can tour and fill up nightclubs and make a living doing what we love.”

The band has just finished recording another CD called Beautiful Death Machine, he says. It will be out in November.

Keeping busy matters to Madchild.

“I count on my music and my art to keep me (out of trouble),” he says.

Dagger Mouth, according to press material, “hearkens back to the glory days” of Swollen Members. The band started to make a splash with their 1999 debut album Balance. Along the way the group garnered four Juno Awards and a few MuchMusic video awards, toured with some big names such as Black Eyed Peas and collaborated with artists such as Nelly Furtado and Everlast.

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